Investigation of random beam trips in a linear accelerator at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex for the development of an accelerator-driven nuclear transmutation system

Takei, Hayanori

Journal of Nuclear Science and Technology, 61(8), p.1075 - 1088, 2024/08

https://doi.org/10.1080/00223131.2023.2296039

In the proton linear accelerator (linac), the proton beam is unexpectedly interrupted due to the electrical discharge originating from the radio frequency, failure of the device/equipment, or other factors. Do these beam trips occur randomly? Conventionally, it has been implicitly assumed that beam trips occur randomly. In this study, we investigated whether beam trips in the linac of the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) occur randomly to estimate the beam trip frequency in a superconducting proton linac for an accelerator-driven nuclear transmutation system. First, the J-PARC linac was classified into five subsystems. Then, the reliability function for the operation time in each subsystem was obtained using the Kaplan--Meier estimation, a reliability engineering methods. Using this reliability function, the randomness of beam trips was examined. Analysis of five-year operational data for five subsystems of the J-PARC linac showed that beam trips occurred randomly in some subsystems. However, beam trips did not occur randomly in many subsystems of the proton linac, including the ion source and the acceleration cavity, the primary subsystems of the proton linac.